Flight problems may delay SpaceShipOne’s X Prize attempt

After Monday's successful journey to the edge of space, many reasserted their claim that SpaceShipOne is the leading contender for the Ansari X Prize. Not so fast. Problems during ascent nearly caused pilot Michael Melvill to abort the attempt when the craft violently rolled to the right, but he regained control only to lose attitude control just as the craft left the Earth's atmosphere. A switch to backup systems allowed Melvill to regain control and complete the mission. The problems prevented SpaceShipOne from reaching the planned altitude of 68 miles (110 km) and resulted in a final height of 62.214 miles (100.12 km). The anomalies also caused the craft to miss its planned re-entry zone by 22 miles. But this did not prevent Melvill from earning his commercial astronaut wings and a recogntion by the Guiness Book of World Records.

According to team designer Burt Rutan, future flights of SpaceShipOne are on hold until they pinpoint the cause and fix what malfunctioned. Preliminary analysis of flight data suggest a failure in a trim actuator, but further tests and analyses are needed to confirm the diagnosis. Rutan believes they will know how serious the problem is and could announce the date for their Ansari X Prize attempt in the next several days. However, if there is a serious safety problem and the delay is long enough, it may give other competitors a chance to snag the X Prize from underneath them.

The buzz surrounding the X Prize competition (and possibly the ingenuity shown in the DARPA Grand Challenge) has finally gotten the attention of NASA officials who are contemplating prizes to commercial companies for significant accomplishments such as the first private orbital flight, "the first soft landing on the moon, or for returning a piece of an asteroid to Earth." Cynics may point out that NASA (and their big name contractors) has been historically competitive with others who want to infringe on their territory. But if these prizes are approved, the X Prize competition has shown it can produce a spacecraft that was done on the cheap (under US$30 million) and in a relatively short time (three years). It could be a boon to commercial space entrepreneurs while providing radical approaches and designs that NASA engineers would never have thought of.